[Raw Msg Headers][Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Questions re Zmail



On Mon, 19 May 1997, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> 1. What is this "Timeserver" and why does it garble the ps line?
> 
> 11831  ?  S      0:00 /usr/lib/zmailer/router -dkn 4 
> 11836  ?  S      0:04 /usr/lib/zmailer/scheduler -l /var/log/mail/scheduler.perflog -S -H 
> 11837  ?  S      0:00 TimeServer ailer/scheduler -l /var/log/mail/scheduler.perflog -S -H 
> 11838  ?  S      0:00 /usr/lib/zmailer/router -dkn 4 
> 11839  ?  S      0:00 /usr/lib/zmailer/router -dkn 4 

It is responsible for serving the current date/time.  I guess the idea is
that, at maximum, one gettimeofday() per second will occur due to the
scheduler.  On a busy mail system it could be a significant win.

I too noticed that, but it's not really harmful - it's just not over-writing
the entire previous argv.


> Also how big can the lists be that Zmailer can reasonably handle natively
> 
> 100.000? 10.000? 1.000?
[...]
> Or is it better to have bulkmail or smartlist handle the mailing lists?

It's all a matter of how much memory the router process will use when
processing a message to the list.  A longer list = more memory needed.  The
actual list expansion isn't a problem - just the size of the router while
processing a large number of addresses in one message.  Thus an external
list expander (especially one written in an interpreted language) is not
likely to help things.


> I also noticed that the scheduler/router log quite a bit of information to
> files that is not necessary. Any way to switch those off?

The router logging can be controlled by the following line in
/etc/zmailer.conf:

LOGLEVEL="address: deferred: file: header_defer: info: recipient:"

Just remove the things you don't want logged.  The above is pretty much
everything.


Incidentally, my (Slackware) Linux mail system running Zmailer is delivering
messages to an average (over the last 3 days, which have been relatively
quiet) of 60-70k recipients per day (mostly the Miata mailing list) without
a hitch.  Until very recently, I delivered this volume with a P90 with 80MB
of memory.  Your 150MHz Cyrix CPU might be sufficient, but 16MB of RAM is
probably too skimpy for serious work like this with any MTA.

-Andy

Global Auctions